hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3980.txt

Episode: 3980
Title: HPR3980: Huntsville to Vicksburg
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3980/hpr3980.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:14:01

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,980 for Friday the 3rd of November 2023.
Today's show is entitled Huntsville to Vicksburg.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Ahu Kha and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, from NASA to the Civil War.
Hello, this is Ahu Kha, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our series on our RV journey.
And this time we're talking about our trip to the southeast of the United States.
When we picked this up on December the 23rd, we were in Huntsville, Alabama, and we had
thought we would be visiting the US Space and Rocket Center today, but because of this
Arctic air mass hitting the South Central United States, they closed it.
So it became a day off.
When we woke up, it was definitely cold outside, but inside the RV we were reasonably
comfortable thanks to the precautions we took.
Now we have three days to sit and relax because obviously tomorrow is Christmas Eve and
the following is Christmas Day, so we got a three-day weekend here.
Now we've got some stuff to do.
Shopping for groceries is certainly part of the program.
We need to dump the tanks, but we decided to wait until the warmest part of the day to
do that.
Sadly, when we tried, everything was frozen.
We went shopping for things that might help, but all of the heat tape in town was sold
out when we went looking.
So we had to improvise something, and we decided to use some of the reflectics we had to
make a box to block the cold wind around the tank and then put an electric heater there.
We have an electric heater in our RV that we can plug in to get a little extra heat on
cold days, so we moved it outside and put it into the box.
Ideally, we would have laid it down on its side and aimed it up at the frozen pipes,
but it has a safety feature.
If it's on its side, it automatically shuts off.
Probably a good thing, you know, if for some reason it were to fall over inside the RV,
we would not want something to catch on fire.
So we had to put it in standing up and just sort of aim it at the pipes.
And we let it go, and while we were out, we did some grocery shopping, so we're good
for a few days.
And after a few hours of the heater blowing on the valves inside the reflectics box,
we were in fact able to dump our tanks.
And inside the RV, everything is nice and toasty, so we managed to survive another day.
And when I get up in the morning, I can take a shower.
Dumping the tanks is important for that, because when the tanks are full, the water has
no place to go, it just starts backing up, and that's not good.
Oh, next day, December 24th, Christmas Eve on the road again.
This is two years in a row, we've spent Christmas Eve on the road.
And this time in Northern Alabama, we had to get up in the middle of the night to switch
propane bottles, which is how things go sometimes, better that than freezing.
But I did get my shower.
Now we plan to take the now empty propane bottle and get it refilled, which we did at
loves, which sells propane 24 or 7.
It's one of the nice things about loves.
It's become our go-to place for all of our fuel needs on the road.
The closest one was about a half hour away, but you know, it was the brakes.
And just before we left, we noticed our water pressure had dropped, and upon investigation,
the circuit breaker on the pedestal had tripped, and our heated hose was no longer heated
and had frozen ice inside.
We tried just resetting the circuit breaker, and it did indeed start to heat up again,
but it did seem to be slow about it.
So we disconnected the hose and brought it into the trailer, carefully placing the ends
in the shower basin.
By the time we got back from getting the propane, we were able to pour out water and pieces
of ice and reconnect it.
We didn't want to do winter RVing.
That was not really the plan.
The idea was to get away from the winter weather and go someplace warm, but you don't get
to choose what life throws at you.
So we expect things to start warming over the next couple of days, which should make
our lives easier, one more day of idleness ahead of us before the space center reopens.
December 25th, Christmas Day has arrived.
It'll be a quiet day for us.
Cheryl had suggested the traditional going out for Chinese food a few days ago, but now
says she just wants to stay in.
Understandable, since it is still quite cold, though gradually warming.
In the night, the propane seemed to run out, and the gauge showed empty, so we switched
to the bottle we filled yesterday.
But when we went out to put the old bottle in the truck, we realized it was not empty at
all, and switching it back to the furnace worked fine.
Possibly the valve froze or something similar.
We've looked ahead, and by the end of this week, the temperatures will be back up in
the 70s Fahrenheit, which is around 22 Celsius, and there'll be warmer today than yesterday
and still warmer tomorrow.
So I hope we've survived the worst of it.
And Huntsville on December 26th, our last full day, and still in the deep freeze, last
full day in Huntsville.
And just to add to the fun, our refrigerator seems to have died.
Because of the cold, we can keep food fresh outside, but this can't last, because it's
going to get warmer.
We did get one more visit to the space center, and saw another very nice planetarium presentation.
Different from the one we saw last week.
This one was a tour of the solar system, and very well done.
We then went back to the Saturn Hall and looked at exhibits of the space program.
Then we grabbed the good bottle and went to fill it up with propane to get us through
the night, and it began to snow.
And as we came back from loves, we started to see traffic accidents.
People in Alabama are just not used to this kind of weather and don't know how to drive
in it.
With our full bottle of propane, we would at least be nice and warm all night.
December 27th, waking up in Huntsville, we heard warnings on the media to stay off of
the streets.
Now we could have driven on them without problem, because we know how to drive in that sort
of weather.
But you know, it's the other guy you have to watch out for, and they have no idea what
they're doing.
We knew it was slowly getting warmer, so we waited a bit for the sun to clear the roads.
Unfortunately, that put us a little behind schedule.
We went to a propane service place and exchanged our old bottles for two new ones, fully charged
with propane, and then went to buy some coolers to try and keep our food edible a little
longer.
So all told, it was closer to 1pm when we actually pulled out, and the RV park was not happy
about that, but you know, we were obeying the authorities.
Now the drive back to Memphis was uneventful, it was dark when we arrived, however.
So we left the RV in the truck connected for a quick getaway in the morning, it ended
up being a very tiring day.
On December 28th, we left Memphis in the morning and drove straight through to Vicksburg, getting
the park around 2pm, which is not bad.
At last we have the warm weather that was the whole purpose of this trip, so we got set
up in the campground and opened the windows, then we went to buy ice for the coolers.
We may have to ditch some food, but that's not the end of the world, if we can get the
refrigerator fixed we can buy more food.
We also need to do laundry, and I want to visit the Civil War battle site, but a warm
sunny day is a big lift to the spirits here.
December 29th, still in Vicksburg, a nice sunny and warm day.
Our breakfast Cheryl convinced me that we could probably put in a new refrigerator ourselves.
Now she tends to be fearless about these things.
We watched some YouTube videos that made it look feasible, and then went to Home Depot
to pick up the new refrigerator and some supplies.
We got everything back to the RV and started, and almost immediately ran into a problem
in that we could not disconnect the propane feed line.
We tried putting some WD-40 on the connections, but they wouldn't budge.
And step one of the project is to disconnect and cap the propane line.
Now Cheryl had made the acquaintance of a very friendly mobile RV tech just north of
Jackson, Mississippi, named Anthony, and she texted him a picture of the way the pipes
for the propane were set up, and he allowed us how he'd never seen anything like it.
But if we wanted to bring it to him, he would take care of it for us.
By now it was late enough in the day that we decided tomorrow would do.
I suppose if we really knew what we were doing, we could have handled it.
But messing around with gas and creating a possible leak is pretty serious, so he didn't
want to chance it.
We made dinner out of some of our defrosted items and went to bed.
Oh, December 30th in Vicksburg.
We woke to thunderstorms and pouring rain, but it looked as if it would pass later in
the morning, and Anthony said to come over.
As we couldn't find his home on Google Maps, he said he would meet us at a gas station
just off of I-55.
We got there first, and when he drove up and saw our rig, he said it probably wouldn't
fit in his yard anyway.
So we pulled under the roof over the truck diesel pumps to get out of the rain, and he
did everything in the gas station parking lot.
And he had no problem disconnecting the propane feed.
Apparently, the WD-40 overnight and some bumpy roads losing everything up, or maybe
he just has the touch.
In any case, by shortly after noon, we had our new refrigerator installed.
So we drove back to the Rivertown Rose campground, got set up again, and cleaned out the coolers.
Some things we tossed, the others seemed good from being kept on ice so they went into
the new fridge.
Then it was off to Walmart to stock up on fresh stuff.
We eat a lot of salads, fruits, and vegetables, and keeping that stuff fresh really requires
a working refrigerator.
December 31st, New Year's Eve in Vicksburg, and it's our last day in Vicksburg.
Now that we've seen you have managed all of our technical problems, we'll just time
do a little sightseeing.
Now the first thing we did is we drove to nearby Clinton to get some child-safe devices
for the refrigerator.
Not that we have children, but RV units are built with locking latches to keep the doors
from opening as you drive down the road.
When you're driving down the road, as I may have mentioned once or twice, people call
it's like, you know, you're going through an earthquake, just from the way things bounce
around.
National fridges don't have locking latches, but they do make devices to keep small children
from opening the fridge, and that should do fine.
So we picked up some of those.
After that, we went to the Vicksburg National Military Park, which we entered for free because
we have our National Park's pass.
The park basically follows the line of earthen fortifications around Vicksburg in 1863
when that civil war battle was fought.
So it essentially surrounds the city of Vicksburg.
You drive along a road that is approximately 25 miles and stop at various points to observe
the battleground.
The ditches and the trenches are still very evident in the landscape.
Vicksburg was the key strategic point on the Mississippi River, and Lincoln called it
the key to winning the war and said that we need to have that key in our pocket.
This task was assigned to General Ulysses S. Grant, ably assisted by Admiral David Porter.
Vicksburg's strategic importance was that it sat on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi,
from which cannon fire could sink any ships trying to pass.
It had such strong defenses that Grant eventually had to starve them out, which is what he ended
up doing.
Now, there is a Union Ironclad Riverboat, the Cairo.
Now, it's spelled as Cairo, like the city in Egypt, but they call it Cairo.
That riverboat, Ironclad Riverboat, was sunk in the river here, but it was raised in the
1960s and is now on display in its own museum.
All in all, this was a really nice bit of sightseeing, and on a day that was dry and
eventually sunny.
So, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you
to support Free Software.
Bye-bye.
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